Aug 22 People cities

Smart city projects may need need lots of clever technology but they also need people

Cities looking to thrive need to get smart by investing in the six s’s: shared, secure and scalable information and communication technology that enables human possibilities in a way that is smart, safe and sustainable, says Nokia in its Enabling Smart, Safe and Sustainable Cities white paper. And all of this can be achieved with a tech fix in the shape of a smart network connecting sensors, machines and citizens to cloud-based Internet of Things applications.

And the centrality of data is a common theme in smart cities, reckons Nokia. Some metros collect and use self-generated data to build their own apps and services, others take a ‘publishing’ approach and make their data available to stakeholders, or curate data provided by others, which can be obtained via open data portals or through paid-for data marketplaces – here the expectation is that third parties may be better at exploiting data than the city itself (see below).

Nokia concedes that smart city projects get to market faster when they are built through the joint efforts of trusted partners, including technology vendors, application developers, service providers, system integrators, utility companies and research institutions and others. But the citizens themselves aren’t given much of a role in this tech-orientated solution.

Data specialists at the likes of Google know more about how citizens move around metros than their local government counterparts who build the roads, rails and pavements that facilitate transport, says Washington-based The Brookings Institution – brand-e

The smart city market is one of the fastest growing segments of government and is set to hit $775 billion in 2021, according to BCC Research – TechRepublic